Weekly Varia no. 25, 05/06/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I never know quite what to do as a professor in the last week of the semester. When I was a teaching assistant in survey courses I dedicated this week to exam preparation, but my deep skepticism of that mode of assessment means that I almost requires students to sit final exams. I have students write papers instead, and, increasingly, I have moved key pieces of the assessment earlier in the semester so that the students are able to revise their work before the end of term. This change gives me more flexibility about what we cover later in the semester, but I go back and forth on what we should focus on given that the “new” content is not going to be assessed on a test. But neither do I want to leave a semester unfinished, so I have recently been doing two things to round out the semester.

First, I use the last couple of weeks of class to complete whatever thematic arcs we have followed from the start of the semester. I started thinking about my courses in these terms four or five years ago when I realized that doing so helped both me and my students approach the material as a discrete unit that layers and builds depth as the semester goes on. The last couple of weeks let us tie these themes together.

Second, I lean into reflection. For instance, in two of my classes this semester I showed the students their opening day Jamboard where I asked them to reflect on what they knew coming into the course. My Persian history class got a kick out of seeing how little they knew, while the Roman history course talked about how they had a lot of key terms or ideas, but as buzzwords absent context. In both classes, we then talked about what they learned and reinforced the themes for the semester. Predictably, my Persian history class ended up in a passionate discussion about the challenges of writing ancient history.

But when I step out of the classroom for the last time for the semester, whether tinged with sadness or relief that a particular class has concluded, I also feel like I’m stepping into an unsettling limbo. As much as I am often ready for a break at the end of a long semester, my work is not over. I will be meeting with students throughout the finals week and screening films for a couple of classes, and the “final” grading push has only just begun.

By next week, though, I might be ready to start looking ahead to the summer.

This week’s varia:

  • Paul Thomas has a good reflection on one of the core challenges of a good writing-intensive class: changing student perceptions about whose responsibility learning actually is. In his estimation, as it is mine, these challenges are systemic to American education, and COVID policies only exacerbated the issues where students often don’t avail themselves of the resources at their disposal and limit their revisions to the things specifically pointed out in the comments, even when those comments are representative of other issues. My hope is that because I’m doing this from my seat in a history department and frequently have the students in our major more than once I can help them break these habits even if it takes more than one iteration.
  • NAEP Civics and US History scores for eighth graders dropped last week, showing a modest drop from 2018 and 2014, but only back to the baseline for earlier years. There is some performative rending of clothes and tearing of hair about these scores (including on my campus), but these scores are deeply misleading. These are not good tests, to start with, and I could easily see how questions about “the rule of law” on a civics test might be shaped by the discourse filled with mass shootings, police violence, and attempts to overthrow the government. But even more damning is the data about social studies instruction that, even disregarding the frequently-true stereotype of the coach-teacher, the suggests that social studies education has lagged behind other disciplines in terms of time and resources. Unfortunately, this new data is being used to manufacture a crisis that can only have negative outcomes.
  • Stephen Chappell writes about his approach to digitally restoring the polychrome painting on the Apollo Belvedere for a French exhibition.
  • Pasts Imperfect highlights a history of philosophy podcast this week.
  • Modern Medieval features an article about a Carolingian coin bearing the name Fastrada, one of the wives of Charlemagne.
  • Baker Maurizio Leo, the author of The Perfect Loaf, asked ChatGPT to provide him a sourdough bread recipe. His assessment is that the AI produced a reasonable generic loaf, albeit with a particularly high baking temperature, but that the recipe lacked creativity. AI is a powerful tool and the pace of its development is truly impressive, but I also believe that even some of the “basic” tasks people are racing to offload onto the AI require more care, attention, and creativity to do well. In many ways, bread baking is a metaphor for life and “Great sourdough bread isn’t simply a pattern that can be detected and replicated; it requires a human touch to guide it in the right direction.”
  • AI machine learning translation tools that swapped singular for plural pronouns (and other little errors) put Afghan asylum claims at risk. I find these tools incredibly useful, but this sort of error underscores my primary concern with AI, namely that putting all your trust in the tools without any way to check or verify the accuracy will cause innumerable problems that will only be caught when it is too late if they’re caught at all.
  • The “Godfather” of AI left his job at Google and raised warnings about the future of the technology. His concerns are about ethics and bad actors, while mine lie more in the likelihood that most people are going to assume that AI can do more than it can in a way that is going to cause enormous disruption while eroding the imperative to learn the underlying skills and putting significantly more noise and misinformation out into the world.
  • Missouri’s Senate passed a proposal to raise the threshold for statewide constitutional amendments to 57% of voters (from the 50%+1 that in recent years rejected right to work, legalized marijuana, and approved medicare expansion, among others) or a simple majority in five out of eight heavily gerrymandered districts. The combination seems designed to curtail the power of voters unless they’re likely to vote the way that the Republicans want. His concerns seem rooted in
  • New reporting at ProPublica has revealed still more financial ties between Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, including more than $6,000 a month(!) in boarding school tuition for a grandnephew over whom Thomas had legal custody. Thomas did not report this financial relationship. At the same time, the Washington Post has a report about money that Leonard Leo funneled to Ginni Thomas the same year that the court was hearing Shelby County v. Holder, all the while directing her name be left off the receipts. There is not much more to say about this deep level of corruption in the Supreme Court, but it seems bad when ProPublica has a section dedicated to this series of stories. Sheldon Whitehouse is spearheading efforts to create accountability, so, naturally, Senators like Josh Hawley claim they are designed to intimidate justices.
  • Herschel Walker’s campaign appears to have violated campaign finance laws by acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars for his private business.
  • This week in “there are too many guns,” a baseball player for Texas A&M-Texarkana was hit in the chest by a stray bullet while he was in a game.
  • Greg Abbott described five victims of a shooting last week as “illegal immigrants” alongside a reward for the shooter in a bit of casual cruelty. At least one of the victims appears to have been a legal resident, as though the residency status matters.
  • A passenger on a New York City subway killed Jeremy Neely after putting him in a choke hold. I almost didn’t include this story in this list I had a hard time bringing myself to read about it and, especially, the discourse around whether killing someone was somehow justified. These posts are a curated rundown of things I read about during the week, usually that I have some sort editorial comment about. When one topic seems to have captured a particular zeitgeist I have nothing of particular substance to add, except to note that the grotesque discourse about under what circumstances it is acceptable to murder people in public absolutely terrifies me.
  • The story that made me think about the gun violence epidemic in the United States was when I heard the BBC World Service do a feature on two mass shootings in Serbia this week, with the rarity of the violence making international news. The level of gun violence in the United States is not normal.
  • Belgian customs officials zealously enforced the complaint from the Comité Champagne by destroying a shipment of Miller High Life after the trade group objected to the slogan “the champagne of beers” on the grounds that it infringed on the designated place of origin label.
  • Astronomers observed a gas giant being eaten by a star for the first time, doing it in one big gulp. Pretty cool.
  • Tucker Carlson has thoughts about how white men fight (McSweeney’s).
  • McSweeney’s has an imagined short monologue: “If elected president, I promise to slaughter Mickey Mouse.”

Album of the week: Justin Townes Earl, The Saint of Lost Causes (2019)

Currently Reading: Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time; Martin Hallmannsecker, Roman Ionia: Constructions of Cultural Identity in Western Asia Minor

Weekly Varia no. 21, 04/08/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I am not a particularly religious individual, but I have a soft spot for the traditions and rituals that accompany holidays. Passover, which started this past week is one that I find fascinating, but I have to confess that it is not my favorite holiday.

Passover ostensibly celebrates the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt as told in Exodus and literally drips with symbolism (pun intended, if you’re familiar with the seder plate). But these traditions are perpetually changing such that a festival that blends elements of a Greek symposium with Jewish ritual and an invented history with a flexible ritual manual (the Haggadah) that can either can freeze the tradition at a point of imagined purity or be updated to address the concerns of contemporary participants, if often in ways that are dissonant with the modern political climate—especially with the traditionally invocation of “next year in Jerusalem.”

Last night while attending a seder I found myself thinking about what a “historically accurate Haggadah” might look like. No references to Pharaoh’s pyramids, if for no other reason than that the chronology is wrong—Khufu’s pyramid was built more than thousand years before the Exodus was supposed to happen. Perhaps, I thought, the Haggadah stories become framed as the product of an oral storyteller balanced against the commentary of a contemporary archaeologist and context can be added to the traditions of reclining for the meal by pointing to the myriad of influences that make up modern Judaism. Precision gets added to the invocations of freedom to condemn those of every background who threaten it. Of course, I quickly snapped back to the present because the purpose of a seder is to invoke and create community rather than to quibble about the nature of labor in ancient Egypt.

But my actual beef with Passover isn’t the service, it’s the food. As much as homemade matzah is a pretty good flatbread, I have been known to joke that I should be able to use a dollop of my starter so long as the baking is complete in the requisite time because you wouldn’t want to leave a carefully curated starter behind in Egypt. (This is not usually how leavening worked in the ancient world. Like I said, a joke.) Nevertheless, I used the seder as an excuse to try a new dessert recipe, producing a delicious and decadent dairy-free flourless chocolate cake, topped with a chocolate ganache.

Since this weekend is also Easter, I get an extra day off, which I’m going to use to sleep, read, and catch up on grading. Whether your holiday of choice this weekend is Ramadan, Passover, Easter, the arrival of spring, or just the regular end of the week, may you find it restful and rewarding.

This week’s varia:

  • Bret Devereaux placed an op-ed in the New York Times, arguing for the importance of the Liberal Arts for a functioning, free, democratic society. His argument here, in effect, is that public and political discourse are strangling these programs, despite both practical and philosophical importance of what students learn in these programs. Bret is an adjunct professor and an excellent historian who has quite a large following on his blog ACOUP, which is an enviable model for public engagement.
  • The lead story of Pasts Imperfects this week looks at recovering the lives of ancient artisans, exploring what the physical objects can tell us about the people who made them.
  • I read three pieces this week on “active learning” that spoke to each other:
    • A couple weeks ago at Inside Higher Ed, Sarabeth Grant talked about how “active classrooms” can be one too many things for overwhelmed students to handle. She points out that many students are unprepared for active classrooms, and relates an anecdote about a particularly negative experience. I find that the preparation varies by discipline and institution, but very much find that all active, all the time has to be handled with extreme care.
    • Jonathan Wilson comments on the “recipe” as a metaphor for teaching, pointing out that simply reproducing the latest buzz of pedagogy discourse is not going to work for every teacher or every classroom. In the middle of the piece he reiterates that lectures and other forms of “transmission” teaching is necessary to facilitate active learning. He describes learning to teach as “learning to cook” as opposed to following the recipe.
    • David Labaree published an essay from his new book in which he makes a case that college teaching is both better than you might think and that it is better than the institutional structure of higher education requires it to be. This is a bit of a contrarian argument, comparing professors to a competitive street gang competing for popularity among the students, but I think he’s got a legitimate point. Professors might have different criteria for success and have different levels of creativity or attention to the craft, but most professors take this part of the job seriously.
  • Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira makes a case for what he calls “epistemic Luddism” against the encroachment of AI on education. Basically, he says the same thing that I have been on about with AI, which is that its proponents largely misunderstand the purpose of essay assignments.
  • LSU played a great game to beat Iowa in the Women’s Final Four earlier this week, though the game was marred by bad officiating. Iowa’s star, Caitlin Clark plays a game like Steph Curry that is a lot of fun to watch, but she is also a trash talker. Angel Reese of LSU, a black player, used a similar gesture to Clark at the end of the game, which caused (mostly white) people online to become outraged and Dr. Jill Biden gave a comment that she’d like to invite Iowa to the White House, as well as LSU. The commentary is mostly not worth reading, but I wanted to highlight that Clark, for her part, seems to have her head on straight and rejected both the criticism of Reese and the invitation to the White House. I also liked Paul Thomas’ reflection on his experience with race on the basketball court.
  • Paul Thomas observes that the laments of conservative academics are performative, just as much as most academics perform progressive social politics in an institution that rewards conservatism.
  • Israeli police raided al-Aqsa Mosque, beating worshippers and arresting more than 350 people. This during Ramadan, which happens to coincide with Passover (and Easter) this year. Israeli police seem to need no excuse for this behavior, but I can’t help but wonder if the convergence of holidays is connected given the desires of religious zealots of both Christian and Jewish traditions who are more aggressively than ever working to define Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.
  • Last week there was quite a buzz about a story from California based on a lawsuit filed against the Shasta County Fair and law enforcement. In short, fair officials decided to teach a young girl a lesson after she bonded with a goat that she owned and was raising for an auction. The girl didn’t want to have the goat slaughtered and refused to turn it over, which prompted the fair to file a criminal grand theft complaint and deputies drove 500 miles with a search warrant to seize the goat, leading to it being slaughtered. Everything about the story is excessive, and in Vox Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz explore how the story is reflective of a larger ideology around 4-H and the inhumane nature of the meat industry.
  • Tennessee’s legislature and its Republican supermajority voted to expel two young black men for their participation in a peaceful protest against gun violence, while narrowly voting to keep the white woman who also participated. This is the sort of action used during the early period of Reconstruction as Black legislators started to be voted into state congresses. This gross, reactionary vote puts the GOP priorities on display, even if it will likely result in a fundraising windfall for both men since nothing prohibits their district boards from simply appointing them as interim legislators or for them to run (and very likely win) the special election. By contrast, one of those Republican legislators rhetorically asked protestors what gun they’d like to be shot with (if not the AR-15).
  • Bolts Magazine shed light on an election loophole in Georgia where an official (in this case judges) who announces their resignation within six months of a scheduled election allows the governor to appoint a replacement and delay the election of a replacement to the next full election cycle, thereby circumventing the democratic process and dissuading candidates from running lest the rug get swept out from under them.
  • Pro Publica has an investigation into the relationship between the billionaire Harlan Crow and Justice Clarence Thomas, including the wide range of gifts that Crow has bestowed on Thomas over the years that the latter has never disclosed. Naturally. Crow has an extensive collection of Nazi memorabilia in his home and a statue garden with (apparently genuine) statues of 20th century dictators, but he apparently is more comfortable discussing his other collections.
  • The British Museum changes tune on repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles and is now offering Greece an “exclusive NFT.” The rare good April Fools piece.

Album of the Week: The Barefoot Movement, Figures of the Year (2013)

Currently Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement; Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity

A plump cat in a sunbeam